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Having spent his childhood and the war years in Bern, Klee moved to Munich before finally arriving in 1921 at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later Dessau, the most important art school of the inter-war period. His pedagogical leaning led him to the systematic exploration of the design possibilities opened up by abstraction, and led him to examine the manifold optical and psychological effects of elementary formal means, as in the spatial and compositional saturation of a grid framework with small squares. Often his poetic imagination would transform a work into a richly allusive visual poem using just a few simple symbols and an apposite title.